The Things on Which We Rest Our Weight

The couch in my mother’s house is coming apart from its center. An overstuffed thing, the middle has broken through the frayed lines of color. This is not the couch of my childhood, which was more tattered and had a gray fabric that looked like the kind of cracker that crumbles in your mouth and chokes you with its dryness. This is the couch of the last house in which my parents lived as people married to each other - the house I spent the summer of my 17th year in, stripping, painting, sheetrocking the walls. I learned to hold the long sanding pole in such a way that with one intentional stroke I could level the tiny mountains that bubbled up under the layers. I learned the complexity of white, the silk of dust, and the illusion of perfection. I wore, on the bridge of my nose, the little red indent of a facemask, and I watched the muscles form under the pink skin of my arms. Now, this couch, (pastel colored southwestern print) a floor model purchased at a discount, that vaguely reflects the color scheme of the house, is loosing its inside. I look away, embarrassed.

Water at night easily looks opaque and eternal. That it is not does not comfort me much. My body is held from the unnamed depths by just the rough slimed wood of this dock, a peninsula that moves under me as I shift under moving stars. Everything is a rotation, or more exactly, a vibration. The sound of the redundant lake waves hums under the undulations of your voice. The frequencies: now in, now out, of phase. Every other word ends too soon or slips into the water. You are telling a story about time, and I have fallen out of it, and keep falling for the rest of the night.

It wasn’t that it was any kind of surprise when, in June, they announced the end. He did the talking; she looked strained and irritated and hard. I have since come to know the solidness of her face that day as numbness; when she thawed, it was a messy, soft thing. Looking to the walls on which I had worked and on whose support I relied when I climbed out of the window on the second floor to sunbathe topless on the roof, I said whatever it is you say in that situation when you are grown up enough to no longer live at home, but small enough inside to still need the sureness of your illusions. I said things like “I understand”, and then went into the woods and lay down, feeling the hardness of a ground that, many layers deep, still waited for the warmth of summer.

Deeply tired, we expect some reciprocity in the silence we give as a gift to those we love, and use as a weapon against those we fear. When - after years of layers smoothed over these now immaculately flat and hard walls - this is exactly what we get, we find the doorframe on which we lean, (having just come in, kicking off shoes, taking in the picture of a place we’ve created and called home), is made of water, and we are falling, in or out, or more specifically, through.

We Could Live Beyond This World

We could live beyond this world


I climbed right through the window and slid down the storm doors after I heard the static of the shower running. The night was warm, an embrace I guess you could say, and I felt as if I might vomit. I remember a few things; my white terrycloth pajama pants collecting the moon along its seams, the fear as I approached the heavy black of the playground, and the pulsing question that ticked itself through my veins, would you be there? You moved from the center of dark to the curve of light from a lamppost, a sort of birth. I met you at the spirit gate and found your new arms. After the kissing came the choking. I remember the look in your eyes: glass, a stuffed and mounted head. What a pretty death you were under the albino clouds. When you declared that the world was fucked, fucked in the way that a Parthenon with crumbling columns is, and that innocence was the last wisp of smoke from a dead cigarette, I opened my eyes a little wider to let in more light. It was no coincidence that I was the first to see the fawn shakily approach with long legs and deep, animate, pupils.

The second time, I was driving at night. Newness in every motion of my hands, my right foot, I was pulled tight between my inexperience and my fear of failure - a perfect metaphor for things I didn’t yet know about myself. When the car driving toward me flashed conspiratorially, I slowed by at least 10 mph and crawled through the dark blue of 9:30 pm, searching anxiously every shadow. Around a curve, I slowed suspiciously – they always tuck themselves into curves and pockets - and before me suddenly, no crown vic, but four brown beauties floating across the macadam. Thinking of you and the infinite wisdom of fate, I felt somehow that my driving was not my own, but the smile line on the face of someone whose eye is the moon, whose chin the valley I drive into, whose cheek the curve of road above which four early spring deer hover like smoke from a spark just sprung.

This past January the darkness of night was heavier than usual. Needing, at dusk we went in search of the abandoned highways. You coaxed me over the cold chain link wall after kissing me through the diamond of air. I scrambled up and perched on the top, a huge clumsy cat without animal sense, and fell messily into your tested arms that had left their boyhood somewhere in the world. What we found was forgotten pavement stretching into the pink of receding sun and overpasses with intersecting animal tracks and hints of graffiti pressing through the snow. We followed an entrance ramp to nowhere and stopped short as a movement ahead cracked through the emptiness. Rolling our feet silently against the gray pavement through the overgrown woods, we saw them. A cloud of smoke this time, weaving through the skinny teenage trees, moving over the crystallized snow. We followed them to the fence, where, instead of dissipating, as one might have expected of spirit animals, they knew the one broken place where the fence bowed and met the ground. When I found their eyes, the gaze was dark water. Stillness crumbled as we ran forward, animal joy of body, and first you and then I, we followed them over the broken fence. They scattered, along with the light, the latter a gradual end, the former an abrupt evaporation into the womb of the wood.

The world is only fucked in the way that any finite thing that wants to be forever is. What doesn’t claw at eternity with the urgency of city skylines, knows life.

The Funeral

Father announced casually, as he moved from the side of the open hole over which hovered the casket in which lay my dead grandmother, that his winter coat had been pilfered.

“You see this coat?” he pinched the long blue fabric from his chest. “Where do you suppose I got it?”

We, the bereaved, were silent. I, for one, was not entirely sure where one would purchase a long winter coat of the variety that a catholic priest would wear. It is possible that others knew and were silenced by gaping grave, the piles of flowers, or the particularly arresting way the lilac casket gleamed in the bland noon light of mid December.

“A thrift store?” offered my aunt helpfully after some thought.

“No” said the priest with the authority of a man who had just, as far as I can tell from my thin knowledge of catholic tradition, performed a significant role in helping my dead grandmother over the threshold of the finite and into the eternal. “I took it home last night from the wake after discovering that my good coat had been taken”. The emphasis on the word good was pointed. “There must have been some mix up” he offered generously, so as not to imply that our mourning family, or my dead grandmother, kept company with questionable characters. “but this isn’t even a coat I could trade in for anything”.

And that was the last we heard of Father. With a smile and some chuckles, he disappeared into the thin winter light to attend a Christmas brunch complete with Santa clause and crucifixes.

She died on a Thursday. We buried her on a Monday.

Among traditions of my family, arriving everywhere late is chief and runs deep in our veins. Naturally, this tradition cannot be altered by death or a funeral.

The morning of the funeral, we were even later than usual. We all suspected that our difficulty getting out the door was in some way related to my mother. In order to understand her behavior, one must first know that she is not catholic, and had, possibly, never been to a catholic funeral mass. Also, her husband of 23 years, who had recently become her ex-husband of about one year, and whom she had not seen in a year and a half, had called her an old hag with all the conviction of a revivalist preacher in his voice the last time they did meet. It was his mother who lay in the casket, and he had made the long trip back to us to bury her. To say my mother was nervous to see him would be something like calling the Weathermen conscientious objectors.

By the time we managed to drag her out of the house and pack ourselves into the car we were so late that it would have been laughable, had it not been such a grave matter to begin with. We got to the funeral home and sheepishly entered the hushed room where the open casket waited - our heads down, our eyes averted - and quietly sat amongst the punctual others.


We waited, uncomfortably staring, shamed pale Irish Protestants amongst ruddy, solid, French Canadian Catholics. “Now that we are gathered” spoke the older funeral home woman - who can really only be described as a picture of herself, as if someone had painted a portrait of a real person, immortalizing and perhaps embellishing the perfectly static tidiness of the pose, and she had climbed from that picture to move about in real life, every hair in place, every thread of her sanctimony righteously stitched into her dark grey dress suit, a military woman, unwaveringly the same, always. “We will say a final prayer” I was surprised at how corporal, how compulsory this prayer was, but bowed my head reverently. As soon as the amens were murmured and the various Catholics crossed themselves, she issued her next command. “Now the back row” (this was us) “will pay their last respects”. I tried to look solemn as we fell over ourselves to get to the open casket. We half knelt and half leaned against Mimi’s little metallic purple bullet of a casket, looking into her made up face. She looked small, but pretty, and far more like herself than the last time I saw her, ravaged by dementia. Death had restored her to herself. It wasn’t as if her soul lingered, but rather that death left us with the gift of sight. To see her in this taxidermy stillness and see something closer to her than the melting mess of flesh and fluid I had seen last, was something like closure.

Mountains speak.

Anyone who says differently has not been intimately introduced to one, or perhaps, doesn’t understand the language.

At 1:30 in the morning, closer to the stars then my legs had ever carried me before, body wind-licked and watery, wet with sweat and moisture from the air, belly empty and mind closer to the nebulous nothing nirvana I’ve always wondered about, I swear I heard voices. Not words, not even a language by any fixed definition I know, but definitely voices. Musical laughter comes to mind, but that diminishes the singularity of the sound. I’ve heard musical laughter many times. I had never, until that moment, heard a mountain speak. It was, of course, probably the water from the internal streams trickling through the rocks, tiny waterfalls here and there punctuating the silence of the night, and the deeper, richer bass hum of the subterranean rivers roaring and rushing below. And below the rivers the silt and sand and rock, the very bones and blood of the mountain. We hung to the side of the mountain, above tree line, exposed, little creatures in a huge expanse. I felt, looking at the stars, which seemed to move to their own music, that we were cradled in the very center of a palm, just where change settles, where the crease of the lifeline crosses, where water pools.


Stars dance, and mountains speak, and the night is a huge hand that holds all gently, together. If you climb high enough, the universe begins to take shape.

The thing was, it wasn’t all romance and poetry. We were clinging to Mt. Washington - home of crazily erratic weather and some of the scariest hiking stories of which I’m aware - at 1:00 in the morning after hiking for eight hours already, up and down, to find friends who had separated from the group to prove a point, or bolster their ego, or something.

The trip had stared out well, but quickly devolved into a petty battle of wills. Mine was most closely aligned with the two sweaty, exhausted bodies panting beside me, pulling their weight over boulders in the cold white light of mooned night. The two missing, for whom we searched, took a more casual approach to hiking and had as a result, decided to find their own way and their own pace. Unfortunately, they had declined to hold their own warm clothes or water or food. As angry as I was, my concern trumped the irritation every time I thought of them, defenseless little birds naked against the night and shaking with thirst. My legs found their pace when I thought of our missing comrades.

Mountains, when you’re halfway up, don’t seem like huge endeavors, but rather a collection of steps. We stopped to rest in a hollow of rocks. The wind chilled sweat froze on our clothes, and for just a moment we paused, back against the mountain, face to the sky. The fullness I found in this hollow seemed almost too much. We pressed on; the cold of night wouldn’t let us be still for very long. When you’re high enough on a mountain, far above vegetation, the very rocks you climb become your trailblazers. There is the occasional spot of spray paint on a rock here and there, but mostly, piles of stones, placed by earlier travelers, mark your path. How often I mistook a stone pile for a person in my exhausted delirium, I can’t recount.


Mt. Washington, before the arrival of European settlers, was called Agiocochook, or Home of the Great Spirit. The natives who called it such must have felt the majesty of its vastness. They also feared its tendency to surprise and create its own system of weather. One can feel the energy of the possible on that mountain; the possible glories of reaching the top, and the possible misfortunes that can befall one before reaching. If I felt like a small thing in the palm of a hand, if I felt held, I also felt the possibility of all that I was held from. It wasn’t fear exactly, but a buzzing of senses, a clarity that made me dizzy with the realness of our environment.
Maybe it’s mountains in general, or maybe it’s just this one, but it has a way of getting into your head and opening up thoughts you thought you had long ago shelved, for better or worse. As we walked, I thought about God. I thought of the vastness of perception and the smallness of intimacies that is God. I thought about the boy with whom I was in love; the hollowed out feeling he left when he was gone, and fullness I felt in my longing. I thought about the pain of muscles and the ache of emotions, and how sometimes when one increases, the other is diminished.


I thought and thought, pieces of my self coming to the surface, almost as if hiking for eight hours was sweating it out of me. It was peace. It was purgative. At one point, shakily balanced against the star-flecked sky on a ridge line, I knew, beyond knowing, that our friends, for whom we searched, were well and safe. It was a sudden sharp realization and I was stunned with the sureness of it. If the night was so vast, so like a hand holding us within it, then surely it was the same for them. I knew they were held as I was, in something more permanent than even the mountain we scaled.


We reached the top, simultaneously weary and exhilarated, and broke into a creaky old historic building. We signed the guestbook, and slept, curved together like three sugar spoons in a drawer, beneath old dusty table clothes we found. The next morning we woke with the rising sun in spite of our lack of sleep. We stumbled, muscles thawing from the freezing night, joints aching from the cold of the floorboards, into the observation building that was already bustling with through hikers and workers. We told our story, leaving out the delicate points of hiking through the night and breaking into the historic building, both of which are discouraged, to a rather nice but suspicious kid who called the front desk of lodge at the base of the mountain where we had parked our car. Sure enough, two grizzly, sleepy, and mildly disgruntled men were just emerging from a very uncomfortable night of sleeping in their car. Mission accomplished; we found our friends. They had reached the top at sunset while we looked for them the first time. They had walked the service road back to the car, hungry and scared, but perseverant. They split a piece of gum for sustenance and talked loudly against the night to mitigate its heaviness. That morning they drove up the service road to pick us up and we spent the day reveling in each other’s company. We felt lucky to be alive, and happy to find they were as well. We ate, we laughed, we went back to CT by way of the coast of Maine, and then we went home to our separate lives. We didn’t speak much of it; too much had passed to articulate in words. We had brushed against a stranger, larger, and more exact language in which none of us were fluent.


For weeks after, I walked around with an undeniable space within me. I felt as if the hugeness of that night, the majesty of the mountain, had somehow found a place at the very center of me. I also walked around in the shadow of the mountain. It was within and without; it continued to give me the heady feeling of perspective. It was my senior year of college and my entire life was on the verge of breaking into a thousand irreconcilable pieces. There was no way I could have known that when I fell asleep that first night off the mountain in my bed, safe, depleted, head still spinning. When it did happened, when everything I had come to assume as my permanent reality began unraveling, I knew beyond knowing, that the center of everything is somehow always a still resolution of opposing forces; vast yet small enough to exist within, empty yet full. The best word I know for this place where all converges and finds completion is Agiocogchook, the home of the Great Spirit.

Some things we learn just before we need to know them, some things we learn as we need them; but everything, no matter how huge and insurmountable, is only a collection of steps, one foot in front of the other.


Mountains speak, long after one comes down.

On Writing

For awhile
I forgot the way it feels
to be entered and owned

now
the electric blaze
again

sickness
and the pain
of birth

Because I could be the dirt

that collects at the nape of your neck
on a desert camp site in 2004,
or the unbearable cry of a coyote
from just beyond your tent

Love- but that’s not the whole story,
(3 breakups, a lost silver necklace, unsent letters),
and that naming would diminish the meaning -

which is to say: we are not just the letters
in the locker senior year, but also the months of silence
while I studied English at the local university
and you sold coke in a sad and restless city;

that we are not just the raging that consumes
our straining bodies, but the quiet nights,
together or alone, reading a book, watching a film,

and that things change -
at ten I saved up a year's worth of money
for an expensive doll my parents couldn't afford,
and by the time I reached eleven, I wanted new jeans -

or that one settles into things and wears them out:
days fall loosely when the phone doesn’t ring,
new pennies turn into grimy black pebbles,
new cars - dents and dings.

And then, between the intended and unintended silences,
your face becomes more familiar than my own,
and we realize that endurance completes the story.

Because I could be the paper on which you
wrote the letter that said you were coming home,

but instead I am the girl hovering over you in bed,
seeing the deserts and silences from your eyes now,
a communion finally achieved,
as you look up from your tangled blue sheets
and smile.

Sisyphus



The plant in the grad student lounge
wants for nothing, but never grows.

He chain smokes rapidly and jogs every day.

He studies human need behind iconic statues and silver crosses,
reads Camus and Sartre between articles on religiosity and The Denial of Death.

What he wants is to quantify the intimacy between people and their gods.
What he wants to know is: will the leaves bleed, translucent white, if he breaks them?

His hypothesis: the leaves are plastic.

Because I’m from the Bible belt -
because I’m an atheist.

His smile - the waxy green isn’t convincing.

Look - some people drink, some pray.
I study psychology.

Our conversations always end abruptly and I’m never quite sure what was said.

I don’t believe his doubt proves the existence of that which he doubts,
But when I close my eyes the fake green dances across my lids a blood red.

As we leave the lounge, the plant glimmers, absurd and bright,
in the moonlight between slats in the blind,

and he is still smiling, content with what he doesn’t believe,
while I shiver in an emptiness I can’t quite agree with;

not while stars shine in oddly shaped constellations
and mountains are so high.